When my cousin tried to throw all the things out of the house, I managed to collect some stuff and ship it to Amsterdam. Two suitcases filled with clothes, old newspapers, wallpaper, little unidentifiable things. And now I got this great opportunity to work with Chika Watanabe, a Japanese artist based in Amsterdam to recreate / make a new room of six square meters. It's going to be in filmtheatre Rialto in Amsterdam and is not something only to look at but also to sit in and make yourself comfortable. It makes me happy to do this project, to have a small Russian room there, not to throw away those things that have been kept for so long. Makes me sentimental, I know. Chika made some sketches for it. It's going to be in Rialto from 5 of October 2017. Just when the film will be released. Here you can see other interesting work of Chika: http://www.chikahome.nl

While making the film ‘six square meters’ about my Russian family history I didn't get it how little there was transmitted from generation to genertaion. Hardly anything.

Why didn’t I know about the famines that my family have suffered? Why don’t I know about how my grandmother wes forced to work in the collective farm, the slavery of working without being paid? Why is it that my aunts don’t know any more?

There are a lot of different answers to this question. One of the answers comes from antropologist Svetlana Adonyeva, who made an extensive research for over 30 years about peasant life in the last century in Soviet Russia. I listened to her lecture, pointed out by my cousin Tania(thank you!) http://www.sakharov-center.ru/discussions/?id=2655

She speaks about the tremendous gap between two generations peasants: those who were born around 1900 (like my grandmother) and their children (like my mother and my aunts) , born in the 20s and 30s of the last century. The first generation matured before the revolution and stayed deeply religious and traditional, despite the new era of ‘communism’. But their children attended school where they were taught that religious women were dumb and should be drowned. That all old habits should be banned. And imagine your child coming home and telling you “Mum, they told me at school that women like you should be drowned because you are so dumb and stupid to believe in God.” . You can’t answer like ‘Who told you that bullshit?” because your life is at stake and that of your child: you will become the enemy of the people and your child will be bullied and not finish school. Or send to a gulag camp. So all these women/mothers kept silent. And never said a word, didn’t tell their children about how they looked at things. As not create more problems on top of trying to survive, which was hard enough anyway. . And this mecanism worked very well: now, our generation doesn’t know a thing.

And if you take into account that 80% of the Russian population were peasants at the beginning of the 20th century, the majority of the Russians is affected by this.

There were six appletrees in the garden of the Russian family house. Every apple tree had a name for every daughter born, I learned from my aunt Valya. It was under the appletrees that all the family members gathered in summer to eat and meet. And moste of the pictures I have are also under the appletrees. So here they were sitting, this family, like all Russian family deeply traumatized by all the big upheavals in Russia. My mother commented to this picture by saying: Look, we are all looking in different directions. That’s how we were. I would say: look, everybody full of hope, for love, for a good life, but inside the wounds of childhood en deprivation, of lies and propaganda, all of this present and waiting to unfold in life. My grandmother had a very specific relationship with each and every apple tree. Some bore a lot of fruit, except one that was called ‘Muchorka’. My grandmother Polya scolded the tree for being ugly, with branches that were in the way. She threatened it to cut it down. But once the tree strarted to bear fruit (ugly apples ofcourse) the apples had an undescribable good, full taste.

Now they are all cut down. Like in the ‘Cherry garden’ of Checkhov. And it hurts in some inexplicable way.

While making the film ‘six square meters’ about my Russian family history I was struck by the scarcety of stories of my family, transmitted from generation to genertaion. Hardly anything.

Why didn’t I know about the famines that my family have suffered? Why don’t I know about how they were forced to work in collective farms? Why is it that my aunts don’t know any more?

There are a lot of different answers to this question. One of the answers comes from antropologist Svetlana Adonyeva, who made an extensive research for over 30 years about peasant life in the last century in Soviet Russia. I listened to her lecture, pointed out by my cousin Tania (thank you!)

She speaks about the tremendous gap between two generations peasants: those who were born around 1900 (like my grandmother) and their children (like my mother and my aunts) , born in the 20s and 30s of the last century. The first generation matured before the revolution and stayed deeply religious and traditional, despite the new era of ‘communism’. But their children attended school where they were taught that religious women were dumb and should be drowned. That all old habits should be banned. And imagine your child coming home and telling you “Mum, they told me at school that women like you should be drowned because you are so dumb and stupid to believe in God.” . You can’t answer like ‘Who told you that bullshit?” because your life is at stake and that of your child: you will become the enemy of the people and your child will be bullied and not finish school. Or send to a gulag camp. So all these women/mothers kept silent. And never said a word, didn’t tell their children about how they looked at things. As not create more problems on top of trying to survive, which was hard enough anyway. . And this mecanism worked very well: now, our generation doesn’t know a thing.

And if you take into account that 80% of the Russian population were peasants at the beginning of the 20th century, the majority of the Russians is affected by this.

An animation is like a dream; the landscape and people change all the time. This animation is subjective memory: it is mine and Simone's interpretation of the memories of my mother, and the life of my grandparents. My mother died, so she can't say anymore if this is how she sees it. That frees me of being too strict with the historical truth. But still: there is a very fine line: some details are still important and should be right. The italian animator Simone Massi drew a donkey to plough the land, like they used in Italy for centuries. But Russian farmers didn't use donkeys, they used horses instead. So then he drew this horse.

I wanted to show Simone Massi a crib in a Russian wooden house, to inspire him for the animation he is making now. So I googled: crib-russian-village-baby-house...and google gave me this:

Google is like our collective unconsiousness: next to this well fed sleeping baby there are starving children. It is an iconic picture of the terrible famine following the Russian Revolution and the Civil War in the newly formed Soviet State in 1921-23. A French filmcrew was allowed to film the famine to raise money. The next 'famous' famine happened 1932-33 were an estimated 4 to 8 million of Soviet citizens died in (what do numbers tell us when you can count 4 millions more or less?) . There are no documented images of that famine because it was officially denied by Stalin and his entourage. And if you don't have pictures, it doesn't exist, which is actually still the case. And now this picture of a famine 10 years earlier is used to illustrate the famine without pictures. And there is something not right about that.